Regeneration in the Underdark

[Leomar]

Is this a known problem and fixed with the BG2 Fixpack?

 

A gamer reported:

I am just in the town of the Drow and recently I have the problem which two of my characters stop with longer distances occasionally simply and the cursor which marks the aim, disappears.

Both characters wear the ring of Gaxx I have pinched (one before). After I have taken the rings off, it went again.

Another gamer answered:

It is an ancient known bug that regeneration and Drowavatar do not function together.

Greetings Leomar

[aVENGER_(RR)]

This issue is related to the method by which the illusionary drow appearance of the party is implemented. AFAIK, the only way to fix this is to install the "No Drow Avatars on Party In Underdark" component of BG2 Tweaks. Here's a quote from the readme:

 

No Drow Avatars on Party In Underdark (Weimer)

 

Adalon the Silver Dragon normally changes the party to look like drow cosmetically. Unfortunately, the game engine has a number of bugs related to this that cause the PCs to "stutter" and "stop walking" and whatnot (especially if they have regeneration items). This disables the cosmetic drow avatar bit only: the plot remains unchanged.

[devSin]

Yeah, there's no way to really fix this.

[Taimon]

Is this (only) animation related?

[devSin]

I'm not sure what you're asking?

[Taimon]

Me neither.

I'm not sure, but I thought the spell only changes the animation/colors.

I was wondering if this has something to do with the drow animation itself (sounds illogical) or if there are other suspects.

[devSin]

This is fighting effects. Basically, the animation change gets attached to the characters. Normally, this doesn't seem to be too wonky, but when you add in regeneration, bad things start happening (you can remove either to restore normal behavior). The same behavior will occur when another animation-altering effect gets attached (Edwin's sex swap, troll shapechange, etc.) and certain other (persistent?) effects are active.

 

The problem could very likely be in animation handling, but it usually requires other factors to start bugging out (I'm not sure if the fight is only with persistent effects, of which there are only a few in the CGameEffectPersistant or somesuch class, or only certain types of effects, normal or persistent). I think I assume it's from the increased reapplication rate caused by the additional effects, but I don't know I ever payed attention to it beyond fixing Edwin's spells (since his gender is static, we just forcibly set his gender on both passes, bypassing any attaching of the sex change effects).

[Nythrun]

We'd have to replace the effects of both drow change spells with a daisy-chain of ids targeted, permanent duration .effs to stop this.

 

Unfortunately, that'd mess with a bunch of mods, and Aerie too, since she's using the mage avatar rather than the cleric avatar all other cleric/mages get. It'd probably be best served as a tweak pack alternative.

[Jarno Mikkola]

We'd have to replace the effects of both drow change spells with a daisy-chain of ids targeted, permanent duration .effs to stop this.

 

Unfortunately, that'd mess with a bunch of mods, and Aerie too, since she's using the mage avatar rather than the cleric avatar all other cleric/mages get. It'd probably be best served as a tweak pack alternative.

Not if we attach the kind of behavior that seems the most natural, avatar switching, alike in here. But then again 'we' could fix this in 1PP... if you could provide the nice mess of code that only the enlighten ones are barely able to understand.

[yarpen]

Cannot you change whole illusion system from repetetive effect (which is broken, and not only when regeneration is active. Ask Demi about his problems with aura-like effects) to changing look via-script (as in BG2 Tweaks?) Yeah, there's problem that you'll have to write quite long script which will detect every PLAYER1/2/3/4/5/6 class/race combo and assign proper animation. But still that's far better than those glitchings.

[Nythrun]

This isn't related to either of the repeating effect opcodes, DROW_CHANGE doesn't use them. It's a problem with permanent/attach(9) animation change effects, only if stacked with some other persistent-but-not CGameEffectPersistant effects.

 

assign proper animation

is already a problem when NPCs are using custom avatars.

 

It's not that we can't implement a permanent solution (and there's no need for a script at all if you're just iterating over the Player[1-6] objects), it's that we can't implement a permanent solution without breaking something else.

 

BG2 Tweaks has it a little easier here, since it can request installation after NPC mods and account for them individually. That's not a luxury we have And we can't just store the real animation values in script variables, because they'll break if the party is reordered, or if there's multiplayer, or mods.

 

The alternatives (e.g. changing palette only) would also require a nasty degree of hackery (think adding a new primary/secondary type) in order to ensure we can remove them only at the right time.

 

I'm just not comfortable offering an OBC that'll break things - but we can think about it further.

[yarpen]

Then the best solution is to make an optional component of removing drow avatars in-game and tell that player can see his character's natural form, but outside world isn't.

[devSin]

Isn't that, like, already in the tweak pack? I'm not sure what's left to discuss.